Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

Last month I was asked to do a presentation about data center security for a Data Center Dynamics conference in Atlanta.  In my presentation, I offered an explanation of how the traditional CIA fundamental security model projected onto functional dimensions of data center operations and the role of the data center to the Business.  It [...]

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We are conducting a poll to gauge Business’ perception of data center tier ratings, here in late 2011. Why are we doing this?  Well, we are seeing that perceptions about shopping for data centers with tier level as a requirement are changing.  We are seeing that, now that the community has had time to think [...]

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Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a metric created by The Green Grid to determine the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE is a ratio, with overall efficiency improving as the quotient decreases toward unity.  In other words, PUE measures the extra power needed to power, cool, protect, and manage the IT load in a [...]

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Many of the engagements that we work involve producing the initial conceptual layout for construction of a data center.  As a certified design consultant, we draw upon best practices reflected in the BICSI-002 standard, TIA-942, et. al.  Even when the raw space with which we’re working is a nice big rectangle, this job can be [...]

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We’ve written quite a bit in this forum about containerized data centers, and our hope that in addition to providing great utility in current high density data processing implementations, they would also pave the way for a more pragmatic, modular approach to building data center space.¬† We still feel that there are improvements to be [...]

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This week, I had the pleasure of touring a data center developed and operated by a provider that has sites in only two cities in the US so far.  I’m intentionally not mentioning the name of the provider, but would like to share some of the things they’re doing that impressed me.  I was impressed [...]

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The Tier Model for Mission Critical Facilities, created and governed by The Uptime Institute, is the most pervasively referenced data center tier model.  It is, however, not the only tier model for data center facilities, though it enjoys the majority of mind-share in this regard.  We have written about The Uptime Institute’s data center tier [...]

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The challenge in using green energy alternatives such as wind or solar power in data centers is power density.   Data centers consume a lot of power with respect to their physical footprint, so they need very large solar arrays or large wind turbine farms to generate the necessary power for the facility.  Consequently, the amount [...]

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This year’s Cloud World conference was a mashup of three industry conferences-¬† Open Source World, Next Generation Data Center (NGDC), and Cloud World.¬† Even with the combining of three (formerly) major industry events, the attendance volume still only merited the West wing of the Moscone Center. It’s easy to blame the low attendance on the [...]

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I attended the 2009 IT Roadmap Conference in Atlanta, Georgia this week and sat in on the presentation by Johna Till Johnson of Nemertes Research, entitled “Building a Resilient Dynamic Data Center.” The presentation was a summary of hundreds of hours of discussions with data center operators and enterprises with data centers. The information was [...]

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